I only caught the last half hour of the debate, so I missed this bea-u-tifulmoment when Newt took the MSM to task for not once asking asking Barack Obama about his pro-infanticide position in 2008, reframing the abortion issue by positioning Obama as the far-out extremist, he is.

All I can say is THANK -YOU, NEWT. The other guys could learn a thing or two from you.

Btw, I’m not sure Newt’s correct that Obama was never asked about it. Perhaps he was never asked about it during any of the debates. But he was asked by CBN’s David Brody in August 2008, and naturally Obama shamelessly lied his way through his answer while calling the National Right to Life Committee and whistleblower, Jill Stanek liars.

From the New York Sun, dated August 18: Indeed, Mr. Obama appeared to misstate his position in the CBN interview on Saturday when he said the federal version he supported “was not the bill that was presented at the state level.” His campaign yesterday acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate….

Little did Obama know his own words would so quickly condemn him. He admitted what he did “defies common sense and it defies imagination.” In fact, it was heinous.

He also sat down with Obama-friendly Pastor, Rick Warren at the Saddleback Faith Forum,where he – not surprisingly – hemmed, hawed, and yes, shamelessly lied through his answers, there, too.

CNN did actually do a fair report in late June of 2008 about Obama’s opposition to the Born Alive Act in IL:

As I noted in a previous post, it took people like Bill Bennett to point out that the 2003 IL bill had the same exact wording as the one passed unanimously in the US Senate…. Carville had no coherent response to that. He instead took the opportunity to slam Rick Santorum several times for being an “extremist”.

Ironically, Politifact concurs with Bennett 100% in a post about Santorum’s “pants on fire lie” at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition forum in March 2011. He had said, “Any child born prematurely, according to the president, in his own words, can be killed.”

Santorum misspoke. He should have said “left to die”, rather than ” be killed”. He’s guilty of hyperbole.

The meat of the post is where it deals with Obama’s slimy, weaselly, hide-saving whopper:

The federal legislation (the law Santorum sponsored in the Senate) became law in 2002. The federal legislation included a so-called “neutrality clause,” which said the law would not change the legal status or legal rights of anyone prior to being “born alive.” Abortion rights advocates said the clause was necessary to make sure the bill would not affect current abortion laws.

Obama said as far back as 2004 that he would have supported the federal bill and that he would have supported the Illinois versions if they had included a similar neutrality clause. The laws the full Illinois Senate voted on in 2001 and 2002 did not have such a clause, but 2003 is a different story.

The National Right to Life Committee said during the 2008 campaign that the Illinois bill of 2003 did have a neutrality clause. The committee said Obama subsequently misrepresented the bill. Obama responded to that charge in an August 2008 interview.

“I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying,” Obama said. “I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported, which was to say that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion.”

Back in 2008, we requested documentation from the Illinois State Archives about the 2003 bill and found that it did have a neutrality clause, as the National Right to Life Committee said. (The clause was added at the committee level, and those records are not available online. But we have posted the documents we received via fax from the State Archives here).